American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat began his career as a musician and street artist in New York City. Born to parents of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, Basquiat rose to prominence in the 1980s, shifting rapidly from tagging buildings as a part of the graffiti duo SAMO to selling his paintings in esteemed SoHo galleries. Basquiat easily crossed artistic boundaries, as he drew on his pluralist heritage and his lived experiences of racism, recasting episodes from his past into canvases featuring novel arrangements of text, abstraction, and stylized figures. These qualities are apparent in his work Frogmen, 1983, a six-panel mixed media painting in Glenstone’s collection.

–Emily Grebenstein, from the Glenstone Field Guide